Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1887-01-27
HARD-WORkED PEOPLE.
The Almost Incredible Amount of Labor
Performed by Noyelists.

4 believe l would rather work on the
aqueduct than write books for a living,
looking at it merely as a matter of
| manual labor" said Broadway book
seller, whose experience runs back
quarter of a century. Did you ever
think of what the labors of writing
merely moving the pen over the paper,
TO say nothing of the mental strain
must be in writing an ordinary book?
Take novel ike one of Mr.. Howells',
for instance. 1t contains, say, $50
pages, with an average of 400 words TO
the page. or 140. 900 words. How many
hours of composition do You suppose
that means? Well. 1,400 words an
hour is considered a pretty good
gait even if YOU knew exactly
what You want to say and can
clip along without stopping to study
construction. That would mean, at
least. under the most favorable circum-
stances, 100 hours of writing. Now
few authors can compose steadily more
than two hours day. Supposing,
therefore. that the author knows ex-
actlv what he wants to write every day
and can pillow on without interruption.
ii would take fifty days to grind out
book like one of Mr.. Howells'. But
many authors have assured me that on
an average they write each book over
three times before they are satisfied TO
leave it When you consider, besides
this, that the labor Of writing Is. of
course. the merest trife compared with
the other labors of authorship. you can
see that there is no picnic about it
when you think of all these things.
the amount of work done by some Of
our leading novelists seems prodig ious.
There is Miss Braddon, for instance.
Her tireless pen has already raced
through fifty complete works of fiction.
and there is no probability-hope some
people might say-that her supply will
run short for twenty years to come.
Probably there are 5000, 900 printed
words in these books. and to write
| them her hand must have travelled over
| $4,000 or $4,000 sheets of paper, even
on the supposition that she never tore
up or rewrote sheet Sixty thousand
sheets of manuscript paper would make
pile as high as this room. Suppos-
ing that Miss Braddon labors under
the same limitations as other writers,
she has probably written over three or
four such piles in the past fifteen
or twenty years. To do this is no
joke, / can tell you. Yet there are
others who have done nearly as much.
TIE works of The Duchess are num-
1 1n-aI ha far+iae The o.1+bnr ~
Dora Thorne has written SO. Mr..
Black has written % novels; Besant and
Rice turned out %, and Wilkie Collins
| has published 81 Dickens works, in
| Guiding his sketches collected into
volumes and the story that he wrote
with Wilkie Collins, make 35 books
Nobody knows how many Miss Holmes
has turned out, but some persons think
there are a hundred of them at least
Then look at the way Oliver Optic. Mrs.
| Southworth and others have reeled out
story after story, year in and year out
The man who makes any money with
his pen is no sluggard, you can be sure.
Hard as these writer's work. how
ever, the serial story writers for the
weekly papers do much better Tor
worse) than any of them. The serials
they put forth average about $4,000
words In length. One writer of this
kind of trash made $4,000 from its pro-
ductjon last year. He received only
$50 for each serial. Consequently he
must have written IN a single year
twenty serials. or 1900, 600 words
nearly ten times the quantity of mat
ter produced in year by the most pro-
life novelist The late Ned Buntline is
said to have made S2o0.00 by writing
| this class of literature. To do so he
must have ground out during his life
time not less than 100, 900. 0oo words of
! copy, which means an almost incalcu-
liable amount of labor that, deToted to
| almost any other occupation. would
have made him millionaire. ~ 7.
| Aail and Express.